As we implemented our service that adds pageviews to the database, we realize an unfortunate circumstance. Each insert query takes about 12ms, which means our request rate, at least per single CPU core, is poor. We’re talking about 83 req/s poor.

After we set up Elastic APM to log our request transaction, the following thing we wish to instrument are the SQL queries going to our database endpoint. Elastic APM provides instrumentation that wraps the database/sql driver, which produces an *sql.DB.

Elastic APM is an application performance monitoring product Elastic, the makers of Elasticsearch, and most notably the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana). APM is another plug and play product of theirs, that hooks up to your existing ELK installation and provides endpoints for application agents to receive performance metrics data.

As we start to develop real services, we found out that our database handling needs some improvements. We are going to do a series of improvements of the current state by adding some new features, and restructuring some existing ones.

In order to test our microservice, we require a database, running migrations, and our service itself. We’re going to build a docker-compose.yml file which takes care of all of this.

We should move towards writing actual code for our service. We are writing a simple statistics collection service for tracking page views. We are going to create a database schema for collecting page views and improve things along the way.